Challenges: Noise, space and expansion
Located in Tech City's Shoreditch area, City Lifeline is the second-longest established data centre in the UK. It began by providing business continuity services for firms located in the capital before becoming a major centre for telecommunications, and in later years, the internet.
A Tier 3-rated co-location data centre that's carrier neutral, City Lifeline has run up against some interesting challenges since being founded in 1993 - from making the most of limited space in a highly built-up area to ensuring that equipment doesn't keep local residents up at night.
We spoke to Roger Keenan, MD at CityLifeline, to find out more.
TRP: What are the challenges to running a data centre in central London?
Roger Keenan: We're right in the middle of London and we're also in a residential area, which means that we have to be very careful about what do. It means that things like diesel generators have to be heavily silenced, which we've achieved by finding a very good acoustic designer who did a first class job. When you're generating a megawatt of power inside the units, you just close the door and it sounds like an ice-cream van from the outside. It's very quiet.
TRP: How has the limited space you have in built-up central London impact data centre design?
RK: We're right slap in the middle of London next to Old Street Roundabout in the middle of Shoreditch and Tech City, which means that the rent and rates are very expensive - and going up.
It means that space utilisation is very important for us. If we use half a floor on a plant room, that's half a floor of dead space that could've been used for customers' equipment, so we want to use every square inch. To use the data centre's cooling systems as an example, the best way for us to do that is by using a DX-based system.
Alternatives such as free air handling systems, evaporative or other kinds of systems that move large volumes of air slowly take up a lot of space and are inflexible when you want to change things around. With DX systems you're moving the heat around on a little pipe that's around 5mm in diameter, and the amount of space you need on the indoor and outdoor units is very small, so it gives us the maximum utilisation of space.
TRP: Shoreditch has become something of a fashionable area in recent times. Has that helped the business at all?
RK: It brings in sales enquiries and means people are more aware of us, but the fact that City Lifeline is the data centre for Tech City helps us more. We haven't seen people battering the door down because we're in Shoreditch demanding to put their equipment in our data centre, but we've got good business out of it. The people tend to deal with aren't tiny web startups, but more larger Blue Chip corporates, typically medium-sized ones with 50 to 500 people.
TRP: Does being where you are make it difficult to expand?
RK: Believe it or not we're also in a conservation area, meaning you can't do certain things. If you're in the middle of a field in Wales you can put anything up you like - nobody's going to object. If we put in for planning permission here for something that was ugly and industrial, it would get turned down, so we have to take a lot of care with that.
Whatever we do has to be aesthetically right and acoustically right. These days, it also has to meet new things like pollution requirements as well. When the old diesel generators were put in, it was acceptable to churn vast amounts of black smoke across London whenever it started. You wouldn't get planning permission for that today, and quite rightly too.
Advantages, industry health and the cloud
TRP: What are the advantages of being located in central London?
RK: It's mainly location and access. We have several roles - one is that we're a local data centre for people in London. There's a huge catchment area around here, including all of the Tech City people - potential customers that just want somewhere that is close.
The other is the internet is in London - if you go to somewhere up north and you want sophisticated internet connections, you would almost certainly find that you'd connect to somewhere in Huddersfield and that they backhaul it into London - either to here or another data centre. You'd find that all you've done is got the connections that you would've got in London but paid more for it, with more latency, so you might as well put all of your equipment in the capital.
So that's the first advantage. The second is that we have a vast choice of carriers, and the third is accessibility. If you have two engineers who are critical to your business and one lives in Chelmsford and the other lives in Wimbledon, where do you put your equipment? The logical place is in the middle of London, because if there's a problem, that's where those guys can get to quickly and easily.
TRP: How is the health of the co-location data centre industry in 2014?
RK: The marketplace was very flat in 2012 and 2013 - people didn't have business confidence, wouldn't make decisions and a lot of proposals fizzled out. That's gradually changing and the marketplace is increasing, with confidence gradually coming back. We're not in "boom times" - maybe they'll come in a couple of years. At the moment we see a gentle take off, good enough for ourselves for us to expand.
TRP: How is the rise of the cloud impacting the data centre industry?
There's a very strong and clear move from the days where everybody had their equipment on site, had their own comms or server room and operated their own IT on-site. That equipment is gradually being moved off site and into data centres, whether that's because the customer is putting their own equipment into data centres, or into cloud environments.
The cloud has to live somewhere - it's just a posh name for remote hosting - which is another argument. It's been around for at least 25 years. If you take the concept of remote hosting, that was actually around in the 1960s, but it was called time sharing.
The thing that's made the difference is fibre optics - the fact that if you did this in 1976, the amount of data you could transfer on a telephone line was very small and so limited. These days there's fibre so there's all sorts of things you couldn't do back then that you can do today.
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